New Life Out of Old

I’ve found saplings literally growing right out of their fallen forefathers. Some out of the trace of debris, some out of the dry horizontal trunk, some right out of the uprooted foot of the tree.

A big pine tree dies and decays on the forest floor. Sometimes it looks like recent deadfall, perhaps fallen (and it can’t get up) that very season. More often it found its final resting place long enough ago to be a rotting speed bump of its former self—a memory of a tree once standing tall, now slowly disappearing back into the soil that birthed it.

Forest conifers (pine, fir and spruce trees—with needles and cones) die for a variety of reasons. Kinda like us, I guess. Sometimes being clobbered by an unexpected avalanche; sometimes dying from the inside out. In the wilderness, trees can be blown over by high winds, struck by lightning, flattened by a snow slide, burned by fires, or have the life sucked out of them by pine beetles (probably would not happen to us).

Corpses lie everywhere. Some areas look like a backwoods war zone and beg the question, “What in the world happened here?” Clues usually abound, or you might have read recorded history of the area that explains the devastation. Certainly, it’s all part of nature’s cycle of life. Expected. Necessary. Ultimately beneficial. But kind of sad, too, thinking of the life that once tried to sink roots in deep and reach boughs up to break out of the shadows.

Yet, I’ve seen something marvelous coming from this, time and again. I even looked for it specifically (not hard to find) on my last hike on the Colorado Trail. Out of the dead comes new life. I’ve found saplings literally growing right out of their fallen forefathers. Some out of the trace of debris, some out of the dry horizontal trunk, some right out of the uprooted foot of the tree. I’ve even seen new growth coming out of the middle a stump in a age-old logged meadow.

New life out of old. We see it in the forest. We can see it played out in our lives. This is a trade-in … or a trade up. The apostle Paul put it this way: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”